August 27, 2001

KOSOVO REPLAYWhat
they're doing to Macedonia

A
recent report by the Macedonian Information
Agency, filed August 24, gives us the flavor of
what life is like in NATO's latest target:

"Relatively calm Thursday night in Tetovo, without
armed provocations by the Albanian terrorists. Yet
the atmosphere was tensed, as the terrorists continued
terrorizing, driving out the Macedonian inhabitants
from their homes, as well as robbing and demolishing
their properties."

JUST ANOTHER
DAY

Ah yes,
another uneventful weekday night in Tetovo: just your routine
ethnic cleansing and rampant Albanian hooliganism. <<<Yawn>>>
The smoke had barely cleared after an ancient Orthodox monastery
was blown to smithereens when the Brioni Motel in Tetovo was
similarly attacked: two security guards on duty were tied to the explosives [gross-out alert: do
not click if you are squeamish]. The "ceasefire" has been
punctuated by ceaseless gunfire  including a series
of brutal and deadly ambushes carried out by Albanian "rebel"
forces  and over 150,000 ethnic Macedonian refugees
are on the move. But no matter: it's the Macedonians who are
at fault, if we are to believe the limey press. Now that 2,000
Brits are pouring into the country  ostensibly to disarm
the rebels  the war drums are beating up and down Fleet
Street, and the Macedonians are being demonized (just as the
Serbs were in Kosovo) for daring to fight back against a gang
of Western-armed and trained terrorists.

THE 'HUMAN
RIGHT' OF TERRORISM

Naturally
"Human Rights Watch"  one of the biggest cheerleaders of
the Kosovo war  is leading the pack with a report coming
out detailing alleged Macedonian "atrocities" in the village
of Ljuboten. The Macedonian government claims that its operations
were directed at rebel fighters, not civilians, but as usual
Albanian villagers have a different story and the [UK] Telegrapheagerly recounts these tall tales as if they
came within even a few light-years of the truth.

A PATTERN EMERGES

No, wait:
I take that back. I don't know, for a fact, that the
stories told by the villagers are untrue: I note only that
a pattern is emerging, one all too familiar to those of us
who paid attention during the Kosovo war. First, the Albanians
launch a vicious attack, then they scream bloody murder when
the other side retaliates  and only the latter is given
credence as a bona fide "atrocity." Demonization and the intense
personalization of the propaganda campaign are other hallmarks
familiar to aficionados, and from here it seems the War Party
has settled on a Macedonian version of Slobodan Milosevic:
Macedonian interior minister Ljubce
Boskovski, described by the Telegraph has "an ultra-nationalist
and a bitter opponent of the current British-led NATO disarmament
mission." Naturally, the brutal thugs who tied two security
guards at the Brioni Motel to explosive devices after torturing
them are not "ultra-nationalists." Perhaps the right
word is maniacs.

WATCHING HUMAN
RIGHTS WATCH

In any case,
the Macedonian victims of this terrorist campaign, like Boskovski,
will likely be hauled before Carla Del Ponte and her kangaroo
court for daring to imagine that they could defend themselves
 that is the explicit threat behind the Human Rights Watch
accusation, one timed to demoralize as well as demonize the
Macedonians. Wherever the fighters for a Greater Albania take
up arms, there is Human Rights Watch presenting their case
to the West, targeting their enemies and painting the insurgents
in the best possible light. I sometimes think that what we
need here at Antiwar.com is a new column, to be called "Human
Rights Watch Watch," to document their bias and bear witness
to the truth about this left-wing front for the War Party.
(The writer Paul Treanor has described HRW as "a joint venture of George Soros and the State
Department," which about sums up an organization that
includes a US foreign policy maven and pillar of the national
security establishment, Morton Abramowitz, and Bianca
Jagger, international jet-setter and bitch-goddess of political
correctness.)

A POCKETFUL
OF POSIES

There are
several problems with the Telegraph report, not the
least of which is its brazen one-sidedness. The testimony
of Albanian rebel supporters is taken as gospel, and the Macedonians
 so we are told  could not be reached for comment. A child
is said to have been killed by a grenade, which supposedly
exploded in the midst of a crowd of kiddies playing ring-around-the-rosie
in the village square. Strangely, this youngster is apparently
nameless, but one guesses that the Telegraph did not
press the Albanian witnesses too hard on this point. The main
problem is not what the article tells us, however, but what
it omits....

'WE ARE WAITING
IN THE FOREST'

What the
Telegraph doesn't tell us is that on July 29, this
same Boskovski was himself the victim of an attempted assassination
by Albanian militants: his car was ambushed as he was traveling
to visit refugees being returned to their homes. Boskovski's
guards engaged in a pitched battle with the terrorists on
the main road from Skopje, the capital, to Tetovo. This occurred
as the "peace talks" were into their second day. So much of
what is happening in the Balkans is tit for tat, a cycle of
endless retaliations that have to be traced back to some primal
act of violence, some initial outrage, before we can understand
who and what set the whole tragedy in motion. In Macedonia,
we can trace the trail of blood and tears all the way back
to the murder, in May, of Josif
Ilkovski, a Macedonian writer and mountaineering enthusiast,
who volunteered as a host at the mountain chalet on Kitka
mountain. His throat was slit, his body was mutilated with
numerous stab wounds, and a message in ungrammatical Macedonian
was left beside his body: "We are waiting for you in the forest,
UCK."

THE FIRST CASUALTY

The first
casualty of the Albanian ethnic cleansing campaign was born
in 1924 in Veles, Macedonia. A veteran of World War II, Ilkovski
joined Tito's Partisans early in the war, and later became
a journalist, publicist and writer, authoring five novels.
His final work, Ridge, was nominated for the novel
of the year award given out by Utrinski Vesnik. According to a report posted on Reality
Macedonia, "a note was found in the room in which the
murdered journalist, publicist and writer, Josif Ilkovski,
lived on Kitka. It seems Ilkovski wrote his own epitaph. 'Man-beast,
your boundary is good-evil.'" If there is a phrase that describes
the UCK-NLA rebels more succinctly and accurately than "man-beast,"
I cannot think of it.

A MATTER OF
NUMBERS

Speaking
of evil, the NATO "disarmament" process is turning out to
be a joke, albeit a grim one as far as the Macedonian people
are concerned. The NATO-crats are now saying that, instead
of completely disarming the insurgents, they will stop when
they reach 3,500 weapons. The Macedonian government insists
that the real number of weapons in the rebel arsenal is closer
to 70,000  and the respected Jane's Defense Weekly estimates at
least double the NATO numbers in terms of rifles alone, not
to mention surface-to-air missiles, mortars, and other relatively
sophisticated military equipment.

BALANCE OF
POWER

How to account
for this little discrepancy? When we remember who armed,
trained, and tried
to legitimize the Kosovo "Liberation" Army to begin with,
the theory floated in this space  and by many a Macedonian
 begins to make a twisted kind of sense. Instead of restraining
the rebels, NATO is their instrument  or is that vice-versa?
NATO's entry into the country is meant to consolidate and
make permanent the Albanian gains. A good 30% of Macedonia
has already fallen into rebel hands: if the balance of power
is frozen at this level, the fighters for a "Greater Albania"
have already won  with virtually no opposition.

CAMPAIGN OF
LIES

The campaign
of lies directed at Boskovski, the routine labeling of any
Macedonian who dares question NATO's intentions as an "extremist"
or an "ultra-nationalist," is a replay of the methods used
so effectively during the conquest of Kosovo. In Britain,
the War Party is going into high gear, with the most ludicrously
one-sided "news" coverage of the crisis. A typical headline
in the [UK] Times: "Slav sabotage feared in weapons handover"!

SOMETHING'S
ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK

It isn't
the Albanian terror attacks  launched even as Ali
Ahmeti, the bandit-in-chief of the rebel forces, proclaims
his eagerness for "peace"  that get in the way of implementing
the Ohrid agreement. It's those "Slav extremists" who have
the nerve to be "angered by the relatively low number of weapons
to be handed over." But what is so "extreme" about the Macedonian
government's position? After all, this operation was supposedly
launched to effectively disarm the so-called "National Liberation
Army," but now the NATO-crats are going back on their word.
As if to confirm this widespread suspicion on the part of
ordinary ethnic Macedonians, the author of this piece goes
on to inform us that Major-General Gunnar Lange, the Danish
commander of all NATO troops in Macedonia, "surprised the
Macedonian media when he said at a press conference: 'The
mission we have is to collect the weapons that are handed
over voluntarily by the insurgents, so the number they have
declared they are willing to hand over is the number we're
going to collect.'" In other words: the rebels are controlling
this charade, and the Macedonian government is either going
to learn to like it  or lump it. Is it really so "extreme"
to distrust such a dubious method? By essentially treating
the rebels as if they were a sovereign government on the same
footing with the authorities in Skopje, the NATO-crats have
already delegitimized the elected government. But that
is whole point of this "disarmament" exercise: to weaken Skopje
both militarily and politically.

THE SPIN

The Times
is basically channeling the "spin" of British and other Western
diplomats, who are quoted as saying that:

"The
concern about Slav extremists centered on three issues: the
likely dispute over the size of the NLA's weapons stockpile;
the continuing blockade of the main border crossing between
Kosovo and Macedonia at Blace, which is causing serious logistic
problems for NATO; and the threat by some Macedonian Slav
politicians to force a referendum on the peace settlement.
It is feared that a referendum would delay the whole arms
collection program and ruin NATO's plan to start withdrawing
its troops, now expected to rise to 3,800, by the end of next
month."

ATTACK OF THE
BORG

If you object
to the conquest of your country, then you are an "extremist."
And anyone so rude as to take the "democratic" rhetoric of
the West seriously is, without doubt, a "hard-liner," or,
worse, an "ultra-nationalist." Why, how dare those
ungrateful Macedonians demand anything so undemocratic as
a referendum?! As for those Macedonian patriots who dare to
act in defense of home and hearth  let them be forewarned.
They will find themselves targeted as war criminals and dragged,
in chains, to The
Hague. That is the real "news" being reported in
this article, telegraphed between the lines and communicated
to all and sundry  but especially to the Macedonian government.
Like the Borg in Star Trek, the half-human collective
organism that absorbs entire worlds, an attack by the NATO-crats
is always preceded by a call to surrender: "Resistance is
futile."

NO VICE

Well, then,
is it? In short: no. There is still time for
Macedonia to avoid the fate of Bosnia
and Kosovo.
Resistance is not futile  but it's time to start
fighting back. What is needed, as well as resolve and a show
of force, is the political will to survive and prevail 
and a political strategy to fight back, not only on the ground
in Macedonia, but here in the West, in the court of public
opinion. A referendum is the only way to decide the fate of
the country, but that cannot happen until and unless the rebel
army is 100% disarmed and disbanded. Any agreement short of
this amounts to the piecemeal surrender of the country to
the rebels. If this be "hard-line," "ultra-nationalist," and
even "extremist," then so be it  and let the Albanian amen-corner
in the West make the most of it. As a great American conservative
once put it, "Extremism is defense of liberty is no vice.
Moderation in pursuit of freedom is no virtue."

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